Please join us in a MFA lecture that brings together the research and thoughts of Brooke Tuma’s previous two years of the MFA program. Brooke’s photographic based artwork questions authenticity between people, images, and the ever-changing landscape. Brooke aims for audiences question their established ways of thinking and how we experience the natural world around us. Brooke questions the authenticity by creating site-specific art that critiques the digital image culture around us. It is undeniable that a site of natural beauty will quickly degrade into a crowd of tourists once it is posted on Instagram or Google Images as a beautiful image. The herd instinct kicks in, and other users who also want to be photographed in those same lovely landscapes will converge with their own cameras, Instagram accounts, and followers. Working primarily with analog photography allows her to think about a deeper connection with the materiality of photography. Instead of scanning the film and giving the viewer a clear representational photograph Brooke presents the film as a tangible object relinquishing control of the medium and process allowing the material properties to direct the final result.
Brooke Tuma is a MFA Candidate with an emphasis in Photography. Brooke is a visual artist from Kansas who works primarily with photographic processes. In 2020, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in photography from Kansas State University. Her work has been exhibited in several group exhibitions such as Coming Together in Conversation at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 8th Annual International Combined Caucus Exhibition at Box 13 Artspace in Houston, Texas juried by Zackary Drucker, Potlatch at CASP Work Studios Studio D, in Lubbock, Texas, and most recently Trash, Glass, and Silos, CASP Live/Work Studios Studio 2 in Lubbock, Texas. In the summer of 2022 she received funding to attend a month long residency at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, Colorado where she observed the affects of tourism on the landscape.
The MFA lecture meets the part of the requirement necessary to receive the MFA degree from the School of Art.